November 20, 1999

Is This the End of the Story for Books?

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No, Experts Say, but You'd Better Get Ready to E-Read

By DINITIA SMITH

irst the scroll, then the codex and the Gutenberg Bible. And now the electronic book? Almost nothing causes more anxiety in the publishing world than the idea that books as we know them might one day be replaced by electronic or e-books. Will paper books, with their distinctive smell and touch, the special, almost trancelike intimacy they can engender between writer and reader, vanish forever? And if so, what will the experience of reading be like in the 21st century?

Books will still be around, many scholars say, but we may read in a different way.

Only a handful of e-books -- portable devices with screens designed just for reading -- are available today. Among those already on the market are the SoftBook, which sells for around $300 and a commitment of $19.99 a month to buy material for it, and NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook, advertised at $199. Within six months, Microsoft plans to begin shipping the Reader, a new program designed to make the text on a computer screen look as it does in real books. Unlike the current crop of e-books, Microsoft's Reader is not a separate device; it is software designed for use on someone's home or laptop computer.

The Reader will be available as a free-standing program for use with Windows. By giving the program away or selling it at low cost, Microsoft says, it will stimulate the manufacture of more e-book devices that the company hopes will eventually all use the Reader.

Related Articles Taking on New Forms, Electronic Books Turn a Page (July 2, 1998) Creating 'the Last Book' to Hold All the Others (April 8, 1998)

But is the act of reading something that needs improving? Analysts say that existing e-books are selling poorly because consumers are satisfied with the old-fashioned reading experience. "People aren't interested," said Tom Rhinelander, who analyzes the electronic book market for Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., concern that studies computer use. "The market went nowhere in a year. The fundamental reason is that people who read books don't have a problem with books today."

"The main issue is that if it's not broken, don't replace it," Rhinelander said.

Regular books have clearer typefaces than computers, and they are lighter. And e-books have batteries that make them hot. "If you're a consumer, how would you consume this?" Rhinelander asked. "You would buy a $300 device and download it and relearn how to read. If you're a book lover, you're not putting them in a bookcase and giving them to friends."

Even the architect of Microsoft's new Reader program, Bill Hill, admits: "People do not like to read on the screen." He added, "It's horrible."

Consider that some studies have shown that the average person reads no more than three to five paragraphs of text on a computer screen before pressing the print button.

At its best, reading results in a change of consciousness, a total immersion. Indeed, researchers have documented that during periods of total absorption in reading, there are changes in respiration and heartbeat. Computers, with their heft and weight, their lighted screens and distracting icons, interfere with that experience.

But a new generation of readers weaned on computers, habituated to receiving information in short takes, may not find it difficult to acclimatize to e-books.

Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Princeton University who has championed electronic publishing for scholarly dissertations, said, "I think it's only a matter of time before we can have mechanical devices that will make possible a satisfactory but new experience of reading."

But he conceded: "One thing that seems to be missing is paper, the feel of a book when you hold it, its grain, its texture, its elasticity, its whiteness.

The sensation of paper is bound up in the experience of reading. We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper. How will we substitute a new medium for it or improve on it?"

Hill said he drew on histories of reading and studies of its psychology and physiology in developing Microsoft's Reader. "The book today is at the apex of millions of years of evolution," Hill said. "It goes back beyond the printed word and tablets of stone."

Initially, people read on tablets or scrolls without punctuation or spacing between the words. Reading was a communal experience, with texts mostly being read aloud. In the third or fourth century A.D. came the codex, pages bound at the inner margins, which made reading easier because the reader could thumb through the text. The codex formed the prototype for the modern book. Two pages, side by side, also made it easier for the eye to flow across the text, as did adding page numbers. As with nearly every new development in reading, the appearance of the codex brought about social change and facilitated the spread of Christianity, which was a religion of the Book.

In the Middle Ages, punctuation and word separation came into use. Possibly some time in the early Middle Ages, reading became a private experience rather than the communal one of reading aloud.

Gutenberg's printing press and the advent of movable type in the 15th century paved the way for the Reformation, which was a reaffirmation of Christianity as a religion of the Book, with a Protestant translation of the Bible required in every church in England.

After the Reformation, the Enlightenment spread through Europe by means of the printed word, books and pamphlets, resulting in "a secularized world in which print culture is fundamental," said Darnton of Princeton.

Of primary importance in the history of the book is the evolution of typefaces. Books are usually printed in serif type. In this face, each letter has at least one serif or tiny dash attached to it, giving the eye a kind of horizontal line to follow across the page. Many computer texts are printed in sans-serif, blocklike letters that are harder to read. The text in paper books also has kerning, a term for printing certain letters closer together, and ligatures, the blending of two letters into one, both of which ease the eye's path across the page.

Most new technologies begin by trying to duplicate previous technologies, said Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton. "Early photographers did what the landscape painters were already doing. Later, they did things no painter had thought of. The camera could both duplicate ways of dealing with nature and create new ones."

That is in a sense what companies like Microsoft are trying to do: recreate the experience of reading a printed book.

Hill said the main feature of the Microsoft Reader was its new display technology ClearType, which is designed to make a computer screen look like a page in a book, with letters having the same clarity and resolution as they do on paper. The Reader software will have a built-in dictionary, and it will enable the consumer to download hundreds of books into one portable device. As with other programs, the consumer will be able to write in the margins of the e-book and save his place, and instead of the text scrolling down the screen, a new page will appear with the click of a button. Microsoft, SoftBook and Rocket eBook have also joined to establish a universal format for all e-books, called the Open eBook standard.

Still, Microsoft's program works best for reading from a standard LCD screen, the kind found on many laptop computers -- a substantively different act from reading a paper book. And that's a real drawback, according to its competitors. "In the end you're holding onto this big, hot piece of hardware with a short battery life," said Martin Eberhard, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nuvomedia, which makes the Rocket eBook. Of course, with the Rocket eBook and other reading devices, you're still holding a pricey electronic device with a screen.

Grafton of Princeton says the history of the book shows that one form doesn't necessarily replace another. Most computers still use scrolling, just as medieval texts did, for instance.

With e-books, people may learn to read in a whole new way, Grafton said. Instead of reading being a linear experience as the reader's eye moves across the printed page, reading may become "circular," with the reader following text from link to link on a computer screen with the click of a mouse.

E-books may also become simply an alternate form of reading. "Many forms of reading exist in any complex society," Grafton said. "I read my American Express bill different from the way I read the text I'm teaching."

"Reading," he added, "is a complicated, multiple process."